I Know My First Name Is Steven (15 page)

When the Bible Book Store went out of business, it put additional strain on an already strained relationship between Ken and Barbara. But Ken explained the rift to Dennis by saying, "Well, sexually I can't relate to her [anymore]."

Soon thereafter Barbara took a job washing dishes at The Captain's Cove, a fried-fish restaurant on a cliff overlooking Noyo Harbor, and it was there that she met John Allen, the self-described former drug agent, and fell for him. Compounding family matters, Dennis and Christy had a knock-down-drag-out fight: Christy accused Dennis of stealing things from her, and Dennis countered by screaming insults at her. But when the hitting and kicking started, Barbara drew the line: for her this was the last in a series of problems, and she and her children moved out, leaving Ken and Dennis.

The split occurred when school ended in early June of 1976. Barbara and her brood immediately moved into John Allen's own small trailer in the tiny coastal hamlet of Caspar, a few miles south of Fort Bragg, while Ken and Dennis remained in the old blue bus at Noyo. Dennis said that the bus was not very clean, that it smelled and was cramped. But almost unbelievably, it had served as home to that odd family of seven for nearly six months. Then, in celebration of Barbara and her kids' departure, Ken took Dennis with him on another trip to Reno. Again he unsuccessfully tried his luck at the gaming tables while Dennis—wishing he was old enough to go out onto the casino floor—roamed their hotel alone.

After a few days in Reno the father and son drove back to Noyo and the old blue bus. On their arrival Parnell undressed and had Dennis do the same before he fondled the boy's genitals "as foreplay to his having sex with me," Dennis sighed. Then, as Parnell caressed the eleven-year-old's naked privates, he forced his son to reprise the humiliating act of fellatio and put his open mouth over Parnell's naked, erect penis. With Barbara gone, Parnell's frequent sexual abuse began again, and Dennis faced a dilemma: even with his dislike for Barbara, he would have preferred putting up with her ignorance and the occasional sex acts with her just to have had her around to satisfy Parnell sexually rather than his having to submit to his father's almost daily requests for oral and anal intercourse.

As Dennis said years later, "From the start I recognized my situation"—being kidnapped and sexually abused by Parnell—"as life-threatening, and I knew that I had to do what he wanted me to do. When he
first forced me to suck him off, I knew that he might kill me if I didn't do it. There's some times that you just have to go along with things. You have to learn to
never say never,
because you never know when you're gonna have to do something just to survive."

Two hundred miles away, Del and Kay were going through yet another version of their own private hell. Kay's father had picked up and fed a starving, mentally deficient young man whom he then took to meet Steven's parents. Said Del, "I told the kid the story about Stevie and how much easier it would have been if Stevie had just gotten sick and died . . . that we could accept death because that is a part of life. You know, if we had had his funeral and his little body had been dedicated and we would know where he was at, we could go visit his grave.

"So after a while this kid goes off down to Bakersfield and goes into the Salvation Army down there and tells them this story, that he killed Stevie and buried him off somewhere in the hills. And, of course, they called the Merced Police and they brought him back up here. Then he tells them where he's buried Stevie, and it's out toward Cathy's Valley, out beyond the cannery.

"And so the police took him out there with a backhoe and they start digging up the place he said he buried him. And the police was keeping it all real hush-hush, but somebody from the
Sun-Star
found out about it and came out to the cannery where I was working and asked me about it. I got so damned upset that I was bawling and I tried to stick my hands through the wall. But then they didn't find nothing; he confessed
that he had just made up the story because he'd felt sorry for us."

In late June Ken was hired as the bookkeeper at Wells Manufacturing, a small, family-run dental equipment factory near the tiny Mendocino County community of Comptche, thirty miles southeast of Fort Bragg. Ritchie Wells, the owner, was pleased to find as competent and detail-oriented a bookkeeper as Kenneth Parnell. But he was a devout Baptist and would have been aghast had he known about his new employee's criminal convictions, not to mention Parnell's continuing sexual assaults on the quiet, well-mannered boy Wells thought was Ken's son.

For a month Ken commuted along the marvelously scenic coast highway, California 1, south along the Pacific headlands from the Noyo River to the nineteenth-century New England-style village of Mendocino City where, just after crossing the Big River, he turned east into the 200-foot-tall redwood forests that smother the rolling hills between the sea cliffs and the relatively open Comptche area.

Dennis said that he felt it was primarily Mendocino County's beautiful scenery that attracted Ken to the area in the first place and that it was only later that Parnell realized that he had happened onto an area peopled by some of the most liberal, free-thinking individuals in a state known for an excess of such folk. However, Ken discovered early on that most coastal Mendocino County inhabitants observed few social constraints, on the whole allowing their neighbors to do just about what they wanted so long as they didn't infringe on or dictate their lifestyle to anyone else.

Chapter Six

Comptche, California

"
I never wanted to leave there because I was happy."

In late July 1975 Ken rented a spacious double-wide mobile home from fellow Wells employee Tyne Cordeiro, a move which placed him just a mile from his work. Ken was well aware of Dennis's love of country living, and since he seemed to do things to please his "son," it was no surprise that he moved himself, Dennis, and Queenie to this strange, remote, rustic little hamlet. Ken had learned during his first few weeks at his new job that the two hundred folks in Comptche might gossip about their neighbors, but on the whole they let others live their lives as they pleased. Whereas Fort Bragg is the most conservative town one will find in the coastal half of Mendocino County, Comptche's population is as independently minded and diverse in personal philosophies as one could find anywhere in California.

The hamlet has a country store with a couple of gas
pumps out front, a tiny post office, a Grange Hall, a volunteer fire station, a primary school, and The Chapel of the Redwoods, the Baptist church which Ken's employer, Ritchie Wells, built with locally cut redwoods as a gift to his community. Situated in a small logged-over valley 200 feet above sea level, Comptche is a world apart from the damp, foggy, breezy coastal weather in Fort Bragg and along the Mendocino coast where summer rarely sees thermometer readings above the mid 80's. In Comptche—just 15 air miles inland but protected by coastal hills—temperatures of over one hundred degrees are common in the summer.

After picking up his mail at the post office, Ken drove south along Flynn Creek Road for less than a quarter mile before he turned left onto a dusty, bumpy private road which took him over a hill, past a rustic, unpainted wood residence with a few marijuana plants growing among the tomatoes, and past Tyne Cordeiro's mobile home, and then pulled up in front of the rambling trailer which he and Dennis would come to call home for the next three years. Once Dennis went in he was thrilled to see that he had a bedroom of his own, furnished with a dresser, double bed, desk, and chair. It was Dennis's first room of his own since the short stay in the house in Santa Rosa. In addition, Comptche offered a growing boy countless trees to climb . . . so many that "at Comptche there was too many trees for [Parnell] to keep me out of," Dennis laughed in joyful recollection.

Dennis remembers his years in Comptche as filled with almost constant outdoor activities. "I spent a nor
mal life at Comptche. I went through school, I played on the football team, I went through the routine of marijuana that kids experience, and I experienced my first date as every kid has experienced. I had a lot of friends. I loved the place! I didn't think too much about my own family back then. I was afraid I might end up at a boys' home, so, really, I thought, 'Why don't I leave well enough alone?' "

While living in Comptche, Ken and Dennis raised their own meat—rabbits, pigs, and chickens—and grew their own vegetables in the community plot provided by the Wells family. Ken put up much of what they raised in a huge chest-type freezer he'd bargained for at a flea market. In that way they didn't have to spend much for store-bought groceries, and therefore, Dennis said, ground beef for his favorite food, hamburgers, became a rare store-bought treat.

Farther out Flynn Creek Road lived lumberjack Ronnie Mitchell, his wife Joann, and their eight children, five sons and three daughters. It wasn't long before Dennis and the three youngest boys—"Babe Ronnie," 13, George, 11, and Michael, 8—became constant companions. Just across a valley pasture from the Mitchell clan lived Larry and Judy Macdonald, their two daughters, and their toddler son. Larry was a carpenter, a community leader, an officer in the local Grange, and Chief of the Comptche Volunteer Fire Department; and their oldest daughter, Lori, an olive-skinned tomboy, soon became Dennis's first girlfriend.

On Dennis's first date ever, Lori's parents chaperoned them, taking them to a movie in Fort Bragg.
"I can't remember what we saw because I was too nervous," he chuckled. "Her parents sat right behind us." Dennis and the Mitchell boys spent the long, hot summer days frolicking naked in the cool water of the "pothole" in Flynn Creek. One day, unknown to the boys, Lori saw them from her house a couple of hundred feet away. As soon as they were in the water, her brunette hair flying in the wind, Dennis laughed, "She came up on us and we just stayed in the water. She said, 'I can see your bare butts shining when you run around on the bank. You better be careful or someone's gonna see you from the road.' Then she asked me to go swimming with her, too, but I wouldn't go skinny-dipping with her."

That first fall Dennis started smoking marijuana as a sixth grader at Mendocino Middle School. A friend, Ronald Harris, had asked him "to stay the weekend" in the tiny coastal village of Elk, and after breakfast Saturday morning the two boys set out to explore the nearby abandoned beach houses. While wandering about they encountered a fellow classmate who had just got his weekly allowance of weed from his parents.

The three boys stopped at the largest of the abandoned houses, a ghostly two-story vine-covered structure with a crumbling garden wall. Inside the house they took cover from the onshore wind and smoked up the lad's pot. A neophyte at "blowing dope," Dennis said the other boys had to show him how. After that, Dennis admitted that he smoked it during school hours, all the time. "Whenever we didn't have any,
we'd just make a pot raid to one of our neighbors'. There was always someone who had it growing."
*

At home Dennis stuffed his marijuana into 35-mm film containers and then hid them inside the mobile home's heating vents. Parnell never did discover this, but Dennis said that he was always afraid that he would. "Parnell told me that if I was ever caught smoking pot he'd tear my ass up. That's how strongly he was against it at that time . . . until he found out that he could make some money selling it."

A retired nurse, Ruth Hailey, nearly got Dennis in trouble with Parnell over pot. A short, stocky, elderly lady, Ruth was always tending to the business of others. "She has a good eye for a pot smoker," said Dennis. "She thought that my experience with pot was known to Parnell, and she mentioned it to Parnell by accident. I wasn't around at the time, but Parnell brought it up to me. I denied it, of course. He was satisfied with that. I always told him what he wanted to hear. He was slightly gullible and a pretty easy individual to fool. I got very good at telling a lie, but not really lying . . . just sort of bending the truth. That's what made it easy for him to believe me."

During Dennis's first year in Comptche the John Peace family lived directly across Flynn Creek Road from the Macdonalds and Mitchells and Dennis
quickly developed a close platonic relationship with their thirteen-year-old daughter Kim—she later married his friend Joe Gomes—which lasted until well after she had moved to Caspar on the coast and he had left Mendocino County. Kim's mother Sherry quickly took on the role of surrogate mother to this "motherless" boy. But from the start her husband sensed something very odd about Dennis and his "father." "Dennis was strange," John said. "There was always something different about him. He never could confide in me. I knew something was wrong sexually. I knew that, but I didn't know what it was. In other words, he [Dennis] felt
it
—whatever
it
was—was wrong. But Dennis was really close to my ex-wife. He would spend time talking to the wife.

"And Parnell, he was always fairly strange. I never could understand why, when he would take off to see his mother—which I thought was Dennis's grandmother—he never would take Dennis with him. But Comptche, I mean, just living out in the middle of no place with a lot of squirrelly people, we thought that Parnell was just one of 'em."

"Because of the sexual abuse, I was always scared of Parnell," Dennis recounted, "and a lot of time I felt violence toward him. The sex was just whenever he felt like it. It was really quite fast, actually. When he was in the mood, we did it . . . just took a couple of minutes and it was over. Boom! I was dressed and out the door! The anal intercourse was painful. Parnell screwed me about a hundred times, and about half the time he split my butt. It hurt, but he just ignored me. It was like in the case of a man raping a woman. The man is not thinking about the woman's feelings.
Parnell had a split personality. When the urge hit him he was somebody different. And after he'd done it with me, he always just went on like nothing had happened. We'd sit down and have a meal or something . . . just do what we'd normally do. But due to the sex abuse, I really didn't look to Parnell for any attention. I did look to friends and my friends' parents for the attention I needed . . . at least to some extent to Mrs. Peace. Really, I tried to stay away from Parnell as much as possible. However, there were times when I really made my presence known to him because no one else was around."